Tak-Wai Chan is Chair Professor of the Graduate Institute of Network Learning Technology at National Central University in Taiwan. In the late Eighties, he pioneered research on virtual learning companions. In 1990, his team developed possibly the earliest networked learning system dedicated to support collaborative learning and competitive learning games. He continued to work on various networked learning models, intelligent future classrooms, and digital game-based learning in the Nineties. In 2000, his team built an online learning society called EduCity. By 2003, EduCity had 2,500 schools and 1.5 million online participants before it was transferred to a telecom company. Throughout the 2000’s, he worked on mobile and ubiquitous learning, one-to-one technology enhanced learning, seamless learning while he continued to search ways of nurturing student interest in reading, writing and mathematics. At the beginning of this decade, realizing the need of a theory that can guide the design of future education in Asia, he worked with a small group Asian researchers, which grew bigger and an IDC Initiative was formed later, to build a learning design theory called Interest-Driven Creator (IDC) Theory. This theory may exert far-reaching impact in future Asian education because the considerably examination-driven Asian education needs to change.

Chan bears a personal mission to facilitate the building of regional research communities since the early nineties. He co-founded two conference series, ICCE and GCCCE, and, respectively, two corresponding international academic societies, APSCE and GCSCE, one for the Asia-Pacific regional community and the other for the global Chinese community.